Scoring the Climax Scene first

When scoring a quite long movie, there is a danger of losing the focus for a proper dramaturgy. Sometimes you work your way up to the climax of the movie but when you reach it, you notice that you scored the few preceding build-up scenes quite big and you need to score the climax bigger than you actually planned to in order to still keep it as a climax which might result in a feeling of overscoring. A good way to work against this is to score the climax scene quite early and set the “maximum music size” with that scene, or at least have a very precise concept in mind how you want to handle the climax scene. It is much easier then to score to and from this scene without running into danger of being too big or too small somewhere before or after.